Griffith's broken body had somehow been restored to its original state, though his face remained pale.
At this moment, he calmly held a continuously spinning, pure black singularity in his hand.
It emitted no light and generated no heat, yet it exuded a terrifying aura capable of devouring everything.
"It is over, Guts."
Holding the black singularity, Griffith calmly looked at the man before him—a man so powerful that he felt unfamiliar.
"You are strong, but in the end, you cannot defy fate."
He explained slowly. This was the ultimate authority he had obtained after sacrificing everything—"Fate Modification".
He could set an absolute "result" that no power could defy.
And the black singularity in his hand could erase any object it touched.
At the same time, the reality-manipulating powers of the other God Hand members fell upon Guts.
Guts suddenly felt an invisible, momentarily irresistible force descend upon him.
Meanwhile, Griffith threw the attack toward him.
Guts dared not hesitate. He fully ignited the magnetic field power within his body, continuously pushing his physical limits to squeeze out even more immense strength.
Seven Hundred and Fifty Thousand Horsepower of magnetic field power, his newly attained mastery of Perfect Compatibility, and the massive surge of energy he extracted formed his final strike.
Guts poured all his will, all his rage, and all his life force unreservedly into this ultimate punch.
This was a final blow dedicated to Griffith and this hellscape, brimming with every ounce of emotion a mortal possessed.
Pushed to his absolute peak, Guts shattered the God Hand's lock the moment he threw his punch. Then, the black singularity, condensed with the power of causality, collided with his fist.
The moment they clashed, all sound and light in the surroundings vanished.
The very concepts of time and space seemed to be erased in that instant.
Immediately after, Guts's right arm began to turn to dust, inch by inch, starting from his fingertips.
That indescribable, incomprehensible power of causality surged up his arm, frantically eroding his very existence.
Arm, shoulder, torso.
Any part touched by that power silently disappeared, like a pencil drawing erased by an invisible rubber.
It seemed he had failed, yet he had also succeeded.
The black singularity capable of obliterating everything was shattered by his magnetic field power before it could completely devour him.
The attack dissipated.
A devastating storm of power peeled back another layer of the twisted earth.
Guts's body crashed heavily to the ground.
His skin resembled burnt porcelain, covered in countless bone-deep cracks.
Golden-red blood continuously seeped from those fissures, quickly forming a pool beneath him.
The fire of life within him was so faint it seemed it could extinguish at any moment.
His body had completely collapsed.
Yet, the burning battle intent and unyielding resolve in his eyes soared to their absolute peak.
Suspended high in the sky, Griffith and the other God Hand members looked down at the broken body below.
Their projections flickered and grew unstable from the backlash of that clash.
Shock.
Incomprehension.
How could a mortal, a sacrifice meant to be toyed with by fate, obtain such power capable of shaking causality itself?
They could not fathom the source of this strength.
However, they decided to hold nothing back anymore.
"Summon our Lord."
The leader of the God Hand made the decision. He would not allow a mere human to ruin their millennia-long scheme!
The other three Demon Kings, along with Griffith who had just recovered some strength, reached out their hands simultaneously.
They converged their respective authorities into a single point, chanting forbidden, ancient syllables that did not belong to this dimension.
The blood-red sky was torn open, revealing a rift even more massive than before.
Behind that rift lay pure, absolute darkness capable of devouring all light.
A colossal eye, impossible to describe with any language, slowly opened from the depths of that rift.
Merely the descent of this projection...
...caused the entire alternate dimension of The Eclipse to tremble under the overwhelming pressure.
The ground, composed of countless agonizing human faces, began to scream and collapse in massive chunks, plummeting into the endless void below.
Space itself became as fragile as glass, covered in fractures.
A terrifying consciousness that transcended dimensions and the very concept of life descended.
On the ground, Guts's broken body, already at the end of its rope, could no longer hold on.
He felt a crushing suppression on both a biological and spiritual level.
Suddenly, a grand, solemn voice—sounding as if countless voices were layered together—echoed simultaneously in Guts's ears and soul.
"A soul that has broken free from causality."
"An interesting... existence."
That colossal eye seemed to take a profound interest in Guts.
"Become my subordinate."
"Become the sixth God Hand."
"I shall grant you power that transcends all."
A god was recruiting Guts.
As long as he nodded, he would gain the eternal life others dreamed of, along with immense power second only to one.
In the shadows, Ian, who had been watching the battle all along, nodded in satisfaction at this scene.
The buildup was sufficient.
The audience's emotions had also been brewed to their peak.
"The good show is over, it's time to serve up something even more explosive."
He pointed a finger toward Guts's direction.
A five-colored divine light—composed of blood-red, green, pink, blue, and gold—instantly crossed the spatial distance.
It ignored the collapsing laws of space.
It ignored the terrifying divine might of the Abyssal God.
Like a phantom, it silently shot into Guts's nearly burnt-out body.
The five God Hand members of this world shared many similarities in the essence and manifestation of their abilities with the four Chaos Gods of the Warhammer universe.
However, compared to the true Chaos Gods, their power was as insignificant as a firefly before the bright moon.
What Ian did was very simple.
He directly injected the Chosen powers of Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, Tzeentch, and the Emperor into Guts's body.
He wanted to make Guts the Chosen of the Five Gods.
The moment the power entered his body, Guts instantly understood the essence of these five forces.
It was the endless rage that grew stronger with every battle and never ran dry.
It was the immortal, eternal blessing of the Grandfather.
It was the transcendent wisdom that saw through all things and toyed with fate.
It was the spiritual will that sought ultimate sublimation and perfection.
And it was the immortal power that suppressed all chaos and stabilized one's own humanity.
Five completely different yet complementary great divine powers unlocked the deepest shackles within his body.
In the next instant, his body began to change. Tiny tentacles sprouted from his wounds, intertwining to repair his injuries.
Tentacles covered in eyes and maws coiled together to form his arm.
At the same time, the massive deficit in his body caused by his forced breakthrough was replenished by a bizarre life force.
However, as his body recovered, the physical anomalies began to gradually disappear, and a golden light radiated from his skin.
(Within Guts's body, the Emperor was currently pinning down and pummeling the four Chaos Gods.)
As his body was healed and everything was made whole, Guts's genetic chain was forcibly broken by an even more tyrannical power, and then began to reconstruct.
During this continuous reconstruction, he could clearly feel the power within him climbing.
Eight Hundred Thousand Horsepower.
Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand Horsepower.
Finally, amidst a roar that echoed through his soul, that power firmly stepped into an entirely new realm.
Nine Hundred Thousand Horsepower! His genetic recombination accelerated in that instant, completing hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary progress for other organisms in a flash, becoming absolutely perfect.
Guts slowly stood up from that pool of golden blood.
He was surrounded by a halo of five intertwined divine colors.
His body, which had previously resembled shattered porcelain, was now flawless, every inch of his skin flowing with immortal divine radiance.
Above in the blood-red sky, the colossal eye of the Abyssal God was filled with confusion. It seemed to sense a power of the same "origin" as itself within the man before it.
Guts raised his head.
He calmly looked at that colossal eye.
"Now."
"It is my turn again."